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61 " Whatever pleasures or punishments that await in the afterlife, if there is one, must feel fainter than those that fill any given day here on earth. "
― Anthony Marra , The Tsar of Love and Techno
62 " I remember the Petersburg zoo ... behind the bars a black-spotted beast took long, slinking strides. The magic and shame of something so ferociously impotent. It was our first exposure to incarceration. "
63 " On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss’s wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss’s wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest’s far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn’t need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty. "
64 " I guess our lives are all dreams—as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else. "
65 " Those who can’t succeed, teach. "
66 " Risky move, maybe, but I hadn’t thought any of this through and he seemed about as trustworthy a character as I could hope to find. He’d just nodded with the glazed-over indifference of someone subjected to detailed narration of another person’s dream. I guess our lives are all dreams–as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else. "
67 " What I don’t know is whether I’ve done so out of love or loneliness, or if in this upside-down world where roofs lie on streets, intentions have lost their moral weight altogether. "
68 " They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can’t trade atoms no matter how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We’re not gaseous no matter how we wish to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient. "
69 " Galina called the camp director "a loyal citizen of the People's Republic of Bullshit" for his insistence that Swan Lake contained Marius Petipa's most sophisticated pas de deux. "
70 " For my first year, I combed the shelves of libraries with the most recently expanded edition of Summary List of Books Excluded from Libraries and the Book Trade Network, searching for images of newly disgraced officials. This should be a librarian's job, of course, but you can't trust people who read that much. "
71 " Above the doorway hangs a bumper stricker of a fish with WWJCD? inscribed across its body, sent by an American church along with a crate of bibles in response to our plea for life-saving aid. "
72 " What an improbable thing it was to be alive on Earth. "
73 " Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger. "
74 " We’ll die today, Kolya realizes, but rather than horror or surprise, the realization hits him like the first breath after a long, dark dive under water. "
75 " Our spirit animals were all of the genus American Kingpin Tragically Slain in His Prime. Our parents learned English from the Beatles, but we learned from Biggie. "
76 " This machine has surrendered without a fight. It may have beaten Kasparov but it knows better than to test me. "
77 " The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they’re all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else. We’ve all ended up with men we’d pity others for marrying. "
78 " We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A "
79 " The fact of my arrest condemns me, everyone knows this; if I am a suspect then I am already a traitor, and traitors become prisoners, and prisoners become bodies, and bodies become numbers. The quota has taken my name and voice, so why dignify my question with an answer? "
80 " You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s. His "